Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 23rd, 2017

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Good afternoon.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses, Mr. FitzGerald, Ms. McNeill, and Mr. Geddes.

We'll begin with the presentations. Each of you will have 10 minutes.

It will be followed by questions from everyone on all parties.

I will start with you, Ms. McNeill, if you are set.

[Wilma McNeill, As an Individual]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm happy to be back in front of this committee. I was here two years ago when I spoke on behalf of Dan Harris. We thought we had the day, but it didn't go that way. They called an election, so we lost it.

I'm back again to speak to you and I appreciate being able to be here.

I have been working on making Remembrance Day a legal holiday for 27 years, and I'm not going away. My late husband, who passed away on September 17, 2013, was in the air force for 23 years. We lived all across Canada, in Comox, Winnipeg, Centralia, and then back to our own hometown in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. We had two sons: Lonnie, who served in the navy for 34 years, and Tim, who served in the army for 15 years and spent six months in Rwanda under Major General Roméo Dallaire. That was quite an experience for him.

My brother was also in the air force for a very short time. My husband's family—six brothers and a sister—served during the war. They all came home safe and sound. We were some of the lucky people in terms of losing people in the war. Their picture hangs in the Royal Canadian Legion in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, along with my husband's sister-in-law, who did 10 trips on the Letitia, bringing war brides to Canada. She will be celebrating her 102nd birthday on June 29. She's still in her own home and she still talks about her service, although she doesn't want to say too much. She just enjoys it.

Why I want to have this day is very simple. This year we're celebrating the 150th birthday of Canada. What better time to do things right in honouring our veterans the way they should be honoured? This year also, Vimy Ridge is celebrating 100 years of service, and I'm attending a dinner on April 2 in Sarnia, Ontario, where we live, to celebrate that occasion. We lost 5,000 young men there, just about, and we want them to be honoured properly.

What we're here today to do, I hope and pray, is lift the level of Remembrance Day to a legal holiday. It's high time, and in this year it's the right thing to do. We have so many freedoms here in Canada that some of us may take for granted, and it's time, for sure, that the veterans have their due. We might say, what does this bill do? It's going to raise the status of Remembrance Day. That, to me, is very important. I have written to all prime ministers and all premiers as they changed office over these 27 years.

This bill also provides consistency in the language for the Holidays Act and raises Remembrance Day to the same status.

I could go on and on about my experiences, but I'm just so happy to be here to ask you to give Colin Fraser the Remembrance Day bill, and pass it and pass it quickly. It's hard to believe that we have such a problem for this very simple thing that we want to do. They just have to have the honour, and I'm going to ask you to please support it.

Sometimes when we talk about Remembrance Day, we hear a lot from the Legion, but we must remember that we have other military groups—the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Merchant Marine, the Vimy Ridge veterans. Maybe they're not speaking out loudly enough, but I've had an awful lot of support from all of those people.

Another thing that we say is that we want it for the children in the schools. You can talk Remembrance Day any day of the year, from January to November, but we'll particularly stress it in the week of November 11. My husband, when he taught, had the service all the time in the school where he taught. He raised the situation for the school system.

I know that sometimes the Legions want to have the children in the schools. Well, if they really and truly believe that, then they should be talking to the education department to open the schools on Saturday and Sunday so that the children can be in school if that's what they want. They should be getting an education. I've written and said, “Yes, do this education in the schools”, for sure, but the idea that they have to be in the school is not really a legal request. They should just join together and let us have the day.

Our job here today, all of you, is to support Bill C-311 and advocate for veterans by showing respect for Remembrance Day. We need this bill. I want the veterans to have the day they deserve. Parliament needs to lead by example. This bill allows Parliament to lead the way for veterans.

You parliamentarians need to show veterans and all Canadians that you think this an important step for Remembrance Day. I hope that this committee will help Mr. Fraser take this critical yet simple step by adding one word to the Holidays Act.

Do you think we can do that? I hope we can.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Ms. McNeill.

I will now turn the floor over to Mr. Geddes, who is joining us via teleconference.

Mr. Geddes, just for verification, did you hear what I said in French?

[Dave Geddes, President, Royal Canadian Legion, Kingston, Nova Scotia, As an Individual]

Yes, I heard it.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Did you hear it translated?

[Dave Geddes]

Yes, there was no problem.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Perfect. Please go on.

[Dave Geddes]

First off, I would like to thank you people for the opportunity for me to say a few words on Bill C-311.

I spent 42 years working for the Department of National Defence, 30 years in a military uniform and 12 years working as a civilian with the naval people. I also would like to tell you that today I'm talking as an individual supporting this bill. I'm not speaking on behalf of the Legion.

I joined the Royal Canadian Legion in 1964 in North Bay, Ontario. I have served the Legion in many positions in the last number of years. I'm presently on my ninth year as president in Kingston Legion branch 98 in Nova Scotia.

Why is this day so important to me? I think, as a speaker before me mentioned, we owe it to the men and women who made the supreme sacrifice for this great country of ours, and that sacrifice certainly gives us the opportunity to be speaking here today in freedom. Without it, it may have been be different.

We do have a remembrance service every day in the Legion, but the week before Remembrance Day, we all go to schools with the children and discuss with them what remembrance means to them. They have a small remembrance service in the schools before the 11th, and all or most of them attend our service. Our service is at the Legion every year, and I must say that in the last few years, the numbers have gone up. I attribute that to more than one issue. With the conflict in Afghanistan, when we brought all our people home who made the supreme sacrifice, you could see the difference it made in the people in Canada by the way they paid their tribute on the Highway of Heroes as they moved from Trenton to Toronto.

There's no doubt that the schools are a very important part of the program, because we must pass the torch on to the youth so it will not be forgotten, and it's not just because it has been many years since the First World War, the Second World War, Korea, and the latest conflicts that our men and women have been involved with and in which they laid down their lives for this country. There is no doubt that this, the 150th birthday of this great country of ours, could not be a better time to give this to the veterans, showing them that the government really does care, making this holiday legal for the federal government, and allowing the provinces to make their decision as to how they would want to respond to that as well.

There is no doubt that this bill is a modest measure that adds consistency to the language used in the federal Holidays Act in that the word “legal” will be added before the holiday of Remembrance Day. It would make the language the same as for Canada Day and Victoria Day. While it does not give anyone a day off from work or school, the schools are very good at portraying to the young students that they must take up the cause and hold the torch high as we go forth year after year.

It also raises the importance of Remembrance Day and affirms Parliament's commitment to Remembrance Day as being an important day for Canadians who solemnly remember and honour those who have served our country.

The answer, of course, is that, yes, I think you people can do this, and we all understand that, no, we won't have 100% behind it, but I think it is the proper thing to do for our veterans and I think the time could not be better, and as we all know, anyone can choose to be at a Remembrance Day service if, in fact, they are allowed time off from work.

I agree with your saying that we should leave it to the provinces to decide that. I think it's a great gesture on the part of the federal government to show leadership for those who may want to go down that road.

It does not give anyone a new day off. Other people say, “It's just another holiday and it's a day off.” I don't think that's true. I would think that if in fact it became a federal holiday, you would likely see the numbers at the Remembrance Day services in all provinces grow dramatically. Right now, people would like to take time off from work, but they can't afford to. That is what I think. There's no sense in my repeating anything that's been said before me, because you people know all about that.

That would be my suggestion to you. Thank you very much again.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Mr. Geddes.

We will now hear from John FitzGerald.

If I'm not mistaken, you are wearing a forget-me-not.

[John FitzGerald, Professor, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Indeed, I am wearing a forget-me-not. Perhaps I can speak about that after my comments, if one of your members of Parliament would wish to ask me a question.

Thank you for your kind invitation to speak.

First I would like to make a brief comment about the bill in general; then I would like to speak about the language of the bill for a moment, and third, I would like to speak about some of the general understandings that I and my fellow Canadians here in Newfoundland and Labrador share as a society about the importance of honouring and remembering the sacrifices that are made for our country

First I would say that of course I agree very strongly with and support the idea of standardizing and in fact mandating across Canada the observance of Remembrance Day. It makes, I believe, a great deal of sense. It recognizes and honours the sacrifice, the commitment, and the history of those who have sacrificed for us, and it would indeed be a wonderful legacy to have done this in the year of Canada's 150th birthday.

Second, as a historian who has generally read in the field of war history—though my particular specialties are Newfoundland and Labrador history, constitutional history, the history of the 19th and 20th centuries of Canada—particularly as a Canadian and a private citizen who has visited Vimy Ridge and Beaumont-Hamel, I wish to make one brief observation about the text of the bill here. It's in clause 1, which replaces section 3 of the Holidays Act. It's the phrase, and I quote, “triumphantly concluded by an armistice”. This strikes me in a slightly odd way, and perhaps even in almost a discomforting or maybe even a jingoistic way. Kindly let me explain.

As you will know, Canada's sacrifices, and the sacrifices in my own province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which at the time was a British colony, were very heavy in World War I. Among other engagements, Canada obviously endured the terrible, horrible, cataclysmic, and, as the historians have argued, the nation-forging experience—the crucifixion—if you will, known as Vimy Ridge in April 1917, with 10,600 casualties, among them 3,500 fatalities.

As a fellow dominion of the British Empire at the time, Newfoundland's—Newfoundland and Labrador today—equivalent to Vimy was Beaumont-Hamel, in the Battle of the Somme. Our day occurred on July 1, 1916, when 801 went over the top of those trenches, and the next morning 68 answered the roll call.

That war—the sacrifice, the loss of life, and, in fact, the cost of that war—changed the very nature of life in Newfoundland and Labrador. As much as we might want to think of it today as being triumphant, blood sacrifices of this nature endured by Canada, and Newfoundland and Labrador, are hardly or very rarely ever triumphant.

The Great War, in fact, as we know, was a vicious, brutal, mechanized slaughter of a war, the likes of which had never been seen before in human history.

From my reading of that, I'm cautious about using the word “triumphant”. Yes, Canada was on the winning side, thank God, but at what price? We had to engage in a slaughter, and it was a brutal war. That whole concept of war and loss is very difficult to describe as a triumph.

My mind went back to when, in fact, I walked across the Douai Plain at Vimy. When we, as Canadians, visit there and we look at that profound monument—at least, the several times I did that—my reaction wasn't one of triumphantly concluding an armistice. Rather, personally, very privately, and frankly, I would have to say I had to do all that I could to avoid bursting into tears because of the emotion of that site and the profound, profound sacrifice by our fellow Canadians. At Beaumont-Hamel I was in tears because I found my great-grandmother's brother's name listed on the plaque in front of the caribou memorial as among those who were lost in battle with no known grave.

I believe that Vimy and Beaumont-Hamel are sacred places, if you will, almost holy places for Canadians, just like—and you'll be very familiar with this—the Memorial Chamber in our wonderful Peace Tower where the Books of Remembrance are kept. As Canadians raised in Newfoundland and Labrador, where our experience in World War I and World War II had such a profound influence on our identity and where so many of our citizens know those sacrifices so well from their family experiences, we even find it hard to say we celebrate. “Celebrate” is the wrong word for Remembrance Day; rather, we observe it, and perhaps I will say more on that shortly.

I would just speak for a moment, and perhaps this might be a little bit useful to you, on the mechanics of Bill C-311. I noted from reading the Hansard debates on this bill in the House of Commons that it was recognized by MPs in the debate that the provinces of Canada indeed do have the competence to declare Remembrance Day a public holiday, a legal holiday. Some have already done this, as you've noted.

In this province, Newfoundland and Labrador, that was formally accomplished in the Labour Standards Act of the Revised Statutes of Newfoundland. It was amended in 2001 to formally add Remembrance Day to that list. The mechanism for doing that is the act, of course, but it also enables the Lieutenant Governor in Council to proclaim days as holidays.

It's worth noting that in this province we actually have two separate statutory days or holidays, if you will, on which our war sacrifices are commemorated. They are, of course, the armistice anniversary day on November 11, as Remembrance Day, and the anniversary of Beaumont-Hamel on July 1—at least in the forenoon—which we celebrate as Memorial Day. Most people in my province are very happy to be celebrating Canada Day, but of course, we also have that dual thread of being quite aware of our history in the first war.

This brings me to my final formal observation, that of how, and I guess why, I'm predisposed to believe the intent of Bill C-311 is laudable.

As I say, I've grown up in a province, in a country, and in a community where the warp and weft of the fabric of our society was, in fact, our wartime experiences.

I was a student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, a memorial built in memory of our great war dead in World War I. While I was there as a graduate student, I read primary source documents, letters of people talking about the impact that Beaumont-Hamel had on their families. As a student, I walked through the downtown of St. John's with my late father, who was born in St. John's in 1923. He pointed out to me, when I was a young child, our national war memorial on Water Street, commemorating the people who had died in the Great War—the First World War—and in fact the Second World War and other conflicts. Even Afghanistan is there now.

That memorial—just to digress for a moment—was completed by Thomas Nangle. He was a padre to the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, and it was unveiled in 1924. That memorial, Mr. Chairman, was the first war memorial we can find that was completed in what is now Canada, and in fact in the British Empire. It was inspired directly by the poem In Flanders Fields, by Nangle's friend Colonel McCrae.

You'll see, if you visit St. John's, that there's a statue of a lady holding high the torch. Of course, this is a direct reference to the line in the poem:

The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Mr. Fitzgerald, we've reached the 10-minute maximum. If you want to conclude and wrap up in a minute, we'll have questions for you.

[John FitzGerald]

I certainly will.

I guess I would like to leave the impression with the committee that my culture, community, my province and country, are saturated with the history and the need to remember the sacrifice of Canadians in the wars. I think it's very important, even down to this current time when we have people like Nathan Cirillo and others like Samearn Son who have put themselves in harm's way for our country, that we are grateful and we commemorate especially those who make the sacrifice.

Mr. Chairman, with that, I'd be happy to attempt to answer any questions.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Mr. FitzGerald.

We will now move into questions. During the first round, each of the members will have around seven minutes.

I will now turn the floor over to the members of the Liberal Party.

Ms. Dabrusin, we are all ears.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to share my time with my colleague Mr. Breton.

I want to thank all of you for coming and speaking with us about your own personal experiences and the importance of Remembrance Day, and taking the time to truly think about our veterans and about the sacrifices they've made. It's important.

I'm a member of my Legion, Todmordon Branch 10. They do an amazing job every year of organizing a Remembrance Day at our cenotaph that brings out many young people, people from all generations. It's a great event to get people out, and to stop and to think.

A few years ago, I brought my daughters to Vimy. It was important to me personally as well to take the time to see and to learn about our history. I appreciate what you're doing in taking the time today to talk to us about how important it is.

I want to ask a few questions that came to me as we were talking. I have not forgotten about the forget-me-nots, so I will get to that as well.

Ms. McNeill, you said that there were other military groups that had opinions about this type of bill and recognizing Remembrance Day as a legal holiday. Have you had a chance to reach out to them—or example, the Merchant Marine—and have you heard what they think about this?

[Wilma McNeill]

Do you mean the air force and the...?

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

You mentioned that it wasn't just the Royal Canadian Legion that we should think about, but that there were others.

[Wilma McNeill]

Yes, I said the Royal Canadian Air Force, the navy, the army, the merchant marines. They all support it, but sometimes I don't think they all speak loudly enough about it.

I'm sure they would support doing what we're trying to do today. At least having Remembrance Day up with Canada Day and Victoria Day would be a start. Many of them in the Sarnia area have supported me, and I know they want to see the day looked after so that it never goes away.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

That's great. You've clearly been a tireless advocate on this issue. You talked about your history of having come many times to talk about it.

I was wondering about what types of conversations.... We heard at our last meeting that there were some reservations on behalf of the Royal Canadian Legion about this bill. I am wondering if you have any specific examples about other organizations that may be supportive.

[Wilma McNeill]

I'm not getting everything that you're saying. Can you speak a little louder?

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Okay,

At our last meeting, the Royal Canadian Legion shared with us that they had concerns about this bill. You've mentioned that there are other groups that may be supportive of the bill. You listed a bunch of them. Have you had a chance to talk with them about this bill and creating a legal holiday?

[Wilma McNeill]

I have spoken to the Royal Canadian Air Force Association president, and he was to be in touch with the national president, but he didn't get it done before I came. I was preparing to get more information, but we ran out of time. When I got the call to come, I didn't have time to reach all of them, but I'm sure we can get support from them as well.

When you talk about the Legion, I place a wreath every year for my brother, and now for my husband, and I always attend the services in Sarnia at the Legion, the air force, the navy. I pray. You visit those clubs on Remembrance Day.

When I talk about the Legion, it's just that I know the importance of being in school, and we want them to be in school. We know that everybody's not going to go to the service on November 11, but that's no reason for us not to have the day. Everybody doesn't celebrate Christmas, but we're not going to eliminate Christmas. The biggest halt is that they want the children in the schools. I want them in there too for their education, but they have the program, and if they so desire they can go with their parents to the service on November 11.

We know attendance is improving. Each year more people come out because they're realizing just how much the veterans sacrificed, but if we can get this bill the same as Canada Day and Victoria Day, then we'll be able to move and keep it in there and we won't every lose it.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

That's wonderful. Thank you.

I can't pass up the opportunity, although I think I'm going to be taking away my friend's time.

You spoke quite eloquently, Mr. FitzGerald, about Beaumont-Hamel and the history of Newfoundland and Labrador, but you also invited us to ask you about the forget-me-not you're wearing. Do you have anything else you wanted to add?

[John FitzGerald]

It's simply that they grow on the graves of the Newfoundland soldiers in France. They were among the first of the memorial flowers to be adopted, along with, of course, the poppy, but they have a tremendous significance to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador and they are recognized throughout Canada. It is a memorial flower, and that's why I'm wearing it.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you for that.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Mr. Brassard, the floor is yours.